


As the World Comes to an End

by letters_of_stars



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Endverse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 04:04:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letters_of_stars/pseuds/letters_of_stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And as Castiel gains humanity, so Dean loses his. With every bullet he sends, every night he spends with a bottle clutched in his hand, every order, every new refugee that flees to Camp Chitaqua, every new man, woman and child for Dean to look after, so Dean loses everything that once made him a man. "</p>
            </blockquote>





	As the World Comes to an End

**Author's Note:**

> Further explorations into the universe explored in 'The End'. Includes canon character death, drug use, violence, some sexuality, and suicide.

The world ends on a Sunday afternoon.   
It is sunny. And 63 degrees in Oklahoma, which is where they are when Bobby calls and tells Dean it's too late. Dean hangs up the phone and his hands are shaking when Castiel asks him what's wrong.   
"Croatoan," Dean whispers, and it doesn't mean anything at all, not yet, though it will.   
Castiel suggests calling Sam, and Dean thinks about it for a moment, before shaking his head. "Bobby will tell him," he says, and Castiel wonders what Dean is more frightened of--talking to Sam, or admitting that they've failed.   
Later, when Dean has three empty bottles scattered around him, he smashes the fourth against the tabletop, quite suddenly, a burst of emotion in a near catatonic state. The glass shards cut into his hand, and Cas kneels in front of him, carefully picks out the pieces and spends his waning grace on knitting the skin back together. Dean rubs his other hand over his face, says that they should have known, they should have been able to stop Pestilence in time.   
"Should we go somewhere safer?" Cas asks him, and Dean shrugs.   
"If anyone bloodthirsty soccer moms bust in the door, you'll be able to poof us out of here, right?"  
"Right," Castiel agrees.   
"Then it's not a problem." Dean tugs his healed hand away, the blood still smeared across his wrist and arm, and reaches for another beer. Cas clenches his jaw, and turns away.  
That night, he watches out the motel window as Dean pretends to sleep, but no one comes. In the morning, when they turn on the television, it's to the news that Texas has closed its borders to the rest of the states. When Dean tries to phone Bobby, he gets no signal. Cas doesn't argue when Dean orders him into the Impala, and they drive until Oklahoma is a memory in the rearview mirror. By next month, the entire state is in quarantine. 

***

The virus spreads over a matter of weeks. Dean watches it all on the television at Bobby's place, usually with a bottle held to his lips. States cordoned off, the national government in chaos, doctors from all over the world admitting they have no idea what to do. Bobby tells them that Sam is over on the other side, working with a group of hunters there, including Ellen and Jo. The accusation in his voice is plain, but Dean ignores it in favor of changing the channel to some medical drama.   
About halfway through, the broadcast is interrupted, and a state of emergency is officially declared.   
Dean shuts off the television completely and disappears off into the yard. Bobby sighs and wheels off back to his study, where Castiel knows he keeps his strongest drink.   
Cas studies the map of the United States laid out on the kitchen table, and his finger traces the red line drawn around infected areas, splitting the country neatly in half. He wonders if this was all a part of Heaven's plan as well. It doesn't feel like it.   
How is this paradise, he wonders, but Heaven doesn’t answer him.  
There’s an amulet weighing heavy in his pocket, but he does not take it out. 

***

Hunters gather to Bobby naturally, hoping that the man who had all their solutions before will have another. So in the end, Camp Chitaqua is Bobby's one solution.   
"People are scared right now," he tells Cas one evening over a glass of whiskey. "And those idiots in D.C don't have a chance. All we can do for these poor sons of bitches is have a safe place for them to go."  
They'll gather hunters, he says, and train new ones.   
It's the only hope they have left, and they'll cling to it.   
Cas downs the offered shot, and the dizziness he feels immediately afterwards is merely another sign of his dwindling grace. He doesn't say anything though. Dean and Bobby have more to worry about now than a falling angel. 

***

Dean needs purpose, and given purpose once more, he finds himself. He throws everything he has into Camp Chitaqua, and Cas knows that Dean uses it as a distraction. If he can help these people now, then maybe he can ease his guilt over failing them all in the first place. The Righteous Man.  
Dean barely sleeps anymore, only passes out drunk on the table, but he still wakes from nightmares shining with sweat and grappling at the air.   
"I'll watch over you," Castiel tells him, and he does, but in the morning when Cas finds himself being shaken awake by Dean, he knows that it's only a matter of time before he’ll no longer be capable of doing so.  
"This was never a part of Heaven's plan," he tells Dean. "I don't know what they'll do."  
Dean just grunts, and hands Cas a granola bar. He hadn't realized how hungry he was, until he eats. It's painful, this hunger, and entirely unknown, and Cas wonders how much of himself he will lose before this is done.  
Dean claps him on the shoulder, and goes out to greet the hunters who drove here from California the night before. They say that Los Angeles is a lost cause, and probably San Diego as well, but the northern half of the state could be cut off right away, the people evacuated, as long as they act immediately. Dean doesn't bother to say goodbye, just grabs his bag and leaves. Castiel watches him drive off through Bobby's front window, and wonders if he can still fly. He doesn’t bother trying, because the failure would be too much to handle right now.

***

As the months build, so does the effort behind Camp Chitaqua. And as Dean grows into a leader, so Castiel's grace fades, his essence seeping into his vessel and inhabiting it, owning it completely as his true form shatters and breaks to fit these new constraints. It's gradual, that tug that he feels each day, but his fall is marked by significant events that scream of his faltering.   
The day that Bobby sniffs the air, orders him to shower, leaves some of Dean's things out for Cas to change into. The amulet is transferred to a new pocket, just as safe. He showers regularly after that, and then when the water supply runs low, becomes just as grimy as everyone else.  
The day that Castiel finds he can no longer wake Jimmy Novak from his slumber within their head. His presence is still there, Cas can feel it, but no matter how he prods at Jimmy's consciousness, he will not stir. Castiel misses him greatly, and sends silent apologies, for he can no longer promise to keep Jimmy’s family safe. Jimmy does not respond.  
The day that he and Dean head into Croat-infested territory together, and Cas finds he can no longer heal himself when he slices his arm open on a car window trying to extricate a crying child from the vehicle. (It doesn't make a difference anyway--a few hours later, she turns, and Dean puts a bullet through her head with barely a twitch of his lip.) That night, Dean tosses Castiel a bottle of Advil, tells him to down the entire thing. So Castiel does.   
And then the day that Castiel finally tries, and realizes he can no longer fly. His wings hang heavy and useless down his back. And then, as time goes on, they begin to wear away altogether, nerves fraying and little bones snapping as he walks, incapable of holding together without his grace. Castiel raids an abandoned pharmacy, discovers the beauty of unlimited prescription drugs, the relief they provide for him. He knows Dean disapproves, can see it in the way Dean turns away whenever he sees Castiel pull the bottle from his pocket, but they offer relief, even if only temporary, and he does not have the willpower to stop.  
And as Castiel gains humanity, so Dean loses his. With every bullet he sends, every night he spends with a bottle clutched in his hand, every order, every new refugee that flees to Camp Chitaqua, every new man, woman and child for Dean to look after, so Dean loses everything that once made him a man. He spends most of his time at the camp now, rarely returning to Bobby's place. He tells Cas and Bobby that they should make the permanent move soon, be safer. But Bobby refuses. He might spend nearly as much time as Dean on organizing hunters, making sure the camp has plenty of shelter, is stocking up on food, ammunition, water, but he does not want to leave his books, his precious collection. He tells Dean he will be safe.   
"We might still find something," he tells Cas one night, about a year and a half after the virus was released. "We can't give up." The way he says it, the emphasis on the 'we', tells Cas more than anything that Bobby can see the change in Dean just as clearly as he himself can.   
"What are the angels doing?" he asks Cas more than once, with the same hopeful expression each time, but Castiel can only shrug and say he does not know. The movement in his shoulder hurts his wings, and he reaches for the bottle of amphetamines he keeps close. Bobby watches him closely, but does not say a word as Castiel pushes the pills between his lips and welcomes the brief escape from the world. 

***

Chuck Shurley shows up at Camp Chitaqua in a battered pick-up one day in August. When Dean sees him, he smiles, but it's forced, so forced it's painful. Cas is there when Dean takes Chuck aside, asks him for anything, anything that can help them, but Chuck doesn't know. The angels are no longer talking to him. He looks at Cas when he says it, and Dean follows his gaze, stares at Cas for a long time with chest heaving, with anger or disappointment Cas does not know.   
"Useless. All of them," Dean says at last, and turns to walk away.   
Castiel watches him leave, and then smiles at Chuck, because it's either that or start screaming. "Are you any good with numbers?"  
Later, Dean finds him, and Cas doesn't need to hear the words to know Dean is sorry. They sit together on the hood of the Impala, drinks in hand, and stare up at the stars.   
"I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to leave," Dean tells him. "You can still get out."  
"I have nowhere else to go," Cas answers, and Dean turns his head to study him, eyes searching Castiel's face for something, Cas doesn't know. Maybe he finds it, maybe he gives up, but at last Dean lies back and tucks his hands under his head. Cas joins him, after a moment, and for a few hours, at least, they have this. 

***

Cas is out with Dean gathering supplies in Colorado the day the army arrives at Sioux Falls. It's too close to infected territory, just too close.   
When they finally get there—too late, always too late—Dean is the one to find Bobby's body, slumped in the wheelchair with a book still open in his lap.   
That's the first night Cas can't remember at all. He thinks they burned the body, because his clothes smelled like ash when he woke up in a pool of his own vomit, but Dean is nowhere around. Cas hotwires a car, leaves it rumbling in the yard for hours, raids Bobby's liquor cabinet, and wonders what kind of God would abandon his children. By the time he remembers he has a car ready to go, it' nearly out of gas. He hotwires a different one instead, remembers how once it had been Dean's hands on the wires, teaching him the basics of hunting before any of this began, and before he knows it, the tears are full and hot in his eyes, and he can't see anything anymore.   
He gets back to camp three days later, and Dean is there, mapping out safe territories with a couple of hunters from Nevada--Cas thinks their names are Risa and Evangeline--when Cas stumbles into the room, still wearing off the whiskey he'd brought along for the car ride. Dean looks up only briefly, watches as Cas drags a chair up the table, clunks it down beside Dean and stares at him. "Well, do we have a plan?" Cas asks him, as if Dean didn't abandon him in South Dakota, and Dean flinches away, focuses on Evangeline instead. Risa keeps watching Cas, though, and Cas finds he cannot meet her eyes.   
It's when they're walking to their cabins that Dean reacts, that he slaps Cas's hand away from his pocket, steals the bottle of pills there, chucks it out into a field. Its hits metal, and Cas realizes that the Impala is parked out there, abandoned, just like him.   
"You don't need those," Dean tells him harshly, poking a finger into Cas's chest. It will leave a bruise come morning. "You're not hurt, you don't need those."   
Of course Dean cannot see the bleeding and broken wings that drag behind them in the dirt. "I do need them," Cas says, and walks the rest of the way to his cabin alone. When he looks back, Dean is still standing there, staring at his cabin door. He's still there when Cas falls asleep, the new bottle of pills scrounged from his cupboard popped open in his hand.

***

By the time Anna comes to him, his wings are barely twitching stubs embedded in his back. "We're leaving, Castiel," she tells him, and Cas can nearly hear her screaming as Heaven stripped her of her compassion. Reduced her to merely an angel once more, after years of what their superiors fondly call 'rehabilitation'. His fault, always his fault.   
"Why are you here?" he asks, running a finger along the wet lip of his beer bottle, his fifth of the day. She reaches out, touches his hand, but it's not the same, not anymore.   
"We can offer you forgiveness," she says. "Return your grace to you. Heal you." She gestures to the remnants of his wings, and he imagines she winces, just a little, a crack in the composure Heaven worked so hard to reinstall within her. "Cas," she whispers, and her grip on his hand tightens, "Come home."  
But a home is a place where you belong. And as much as he hates it, as much as he seeks to drown it in alcohol and drugs that will never be strong enough, Castiel knows that where he will always belong is right here, waiting to die.   
"So you've given up," he says instead, and shakes away Anna's hand. "You're letting Lucifer win."  
"He has won anyway," Anna says, and her wings are full and beautiful as she takes flight. Castiel watches her leave, and he thinks that maybe his own wings hurt a little less.   
That is until Dean stumbles into his cabin, and tells him that something happened in Detroit. 

***

That night, Dean falls asleep in Cas's arms, the stench of alcohol wafting in his breath and his order for Cas to never leave him still echoing around the room. Castiel holds him gently, and thinks that this will be the last time he will ever have Dean to himself, because whoever wakes up tomorrow, while many things, will not be his Dean Winchester, but someone new altogether.   
There is an amulet on a leather string tucked away in the cupboard, and he wonders if now would be the time to press it into the lines of Dean’s palm, but he doesn’t.   
Sam is gone. Putting his ghost in Dean’s hand will not bring him back. 

***

It’s when Lucifer begins walking the earth in his proper vessel that at last the television reporters begin to quote the Bible. There’s not much else left for them.   
Massive storms tear the roofs off of buildings in New York. An earthquake devastates the coast of California. Inactive volcanoes suddenly bubble once more with magma. The virus begins to spread through Canada, Mexico, Latin America. Cases crop up in Russia. Not long after that, they lose cable, and all they know is what the refugees tell them.   
Dean doesn’t talk much at all anymore. His hand always hovers around his gun. He doesn’t invite Castiel to come with him when he leaves anymore, and Cas doesn’t offer. He doesn’t think he can stand to see who Dean becomes outside that fence. He stays, and the people still look to him like he might know what to do, like he’s something special. But he’s not.   
He doesn’t want to be their leader in Dean’s absence. He tries to tell Chuck that, but Chuck just looks up at him apologetically. “I’m sorry Cas.”   
It does nothing to help, and still the people, the survivors, look at him like he’s some kind of hero, when he welcomes them through the gates and tells them that here, here with their children, they can be safe. He fails to tell them that salvation is a limited time contract.   
Castiel sleeps with a woman for the first time a few months after that, and she is sweet, and quiet, and good, and everything that Cas doesn't think he deserves. He goes straight to Dean afterwards, tells him that he was the one who let Sam out of the panic room. He needs Dean to yell, and curse, and lash out, blame him, blame him for everything, but Dean only stares up over his row of shot glasses, tells Cas that he knows already. It isn't good enough. Cas sweeps his hand across the table, sends the shot glasses splintering across the floor.   
“It’s my fault!” he screams, and Dean stands, pushes him aside, just like he always pushes him aside, tells Cas he stinks of sex as he does so.   
“Well, you got me laid at last,” Cas tells him, and he sees Dean’s back stiffen, the way his hand tightens on the chair.   
“I never wanted this for you,” Dean says at last, but it doesn’t matter, none of it does.   
“It’s what you gave me.” Cas doesn’t wait for Dean’s reaction, just returns to his cabin, and the woman is still there, still accepting, still soft, and when she kisses him, she does not demand anything at all. And Castiel loves her for that, hates himself for it, and hates Dean more because even as he slides inside her body, it is only Dean he thinks about. 

***

Months pass, and it never gets easier.  
More people come, and some of them stay. Some of the end up shot outside the gates, and Castiel can hear the cries each time, as people who would have become monsters die without that chance.  
He knows the sound of Dean’s shots like his own heartbeat.  
“Maybe you should ease up a little,” Chuck tells him one day, gesturing around his cabin at the various bottles strewn about. “On that and the…the…the sex, you know?”  
He’s well-meaning, but what Chuck doesn’t understand is that the drugs, the drink, the sex---that’s the only thing that helps. The only thing that distracts him from the sound of Dean breaking, over and over and over again. Cas can’t give that up.   
He laughs, because it’s either laugh or shatter, shatter and break like an empty bottle. “I need it,” he says, and Chuck shakes his head.   
“Dean doesn’t like it, you know,” he tells Castiel, as if the very mention of Dean will be enough to drag Castiel back. “I know he doesn’t say it, but he doesn’t like it.”  
“Dean isn’t God,” Cas says, and reaches for the amphetamines as he does so. “And even if he was, I wouldn’t care.”  
Chuck blinks, and stares, long enough that it makes Cas uncomfortable. “I’m so sorry Castiel,” he says at last, and leaves, clipboard clutched to his chest.

***

It’s Evangeline who tells Cas that maybe he would find meditation helpful, one day as they walk together after one of Dean’s tactics meetings, the kind that always end with him and Dean shouting at each other while the rest of them look on. He’s skeptical at first, but she’s insistent, and Cas realizes that she feels sorry for him.   
Sometimes he wonders how much they know. He doesn’t tell them, and to his knowledge, neither does Dean, but perhaps there is a part of him that still screams of otherworldliness. Maybe that’s why the hopeless still gravitate towards him, and why they can’t seem to watch his fall without wincing. Evangeline never mentions angels. She tells him she used to meditate, back before it all began, and she does it with him, once or twice.   
He likes her, likes her enough to think that maybe being close to her would make a difference, but she shakes her head when he kisses her, smiles and pushes at his shoulders until he’s seated back on the floor. “Not me, Castiel,” she tells him, and finishes the meditation session before she leaves. He watches her go, and feels so cold without a body pressed against his own, so lonely.   
He tries to wake Jimmy again, just to have someone to talk to, but he cannot. He doesn’t think that he ever will.   
Abandoned.   
He needs to get out. The four walls of his cabin, too close, too full of memories, the footsteps of people who are gone. Dean, Chuck, Evangeline, Anna, even Bobby had been here once, and his wheelchair had made tracks in the sawdust. And Castiel himself is barely here anymore. He needs to leave.   
The drink fits perfectly in his hand as he staggers out the front door, but it is not what makes him stumble.   
He wanders through the camp, and that wandering brings him to a bed. A girl he does not know with soft breasts and soft lips kisses him, and he knows she pities him. Poor broken angel, doesn’t have a home. He breathes through her, and she into him, and all that matters is the sex, the warmth, the body close to his. He sleeps in her bed that night, and the next, and his wings ache with the need to fly, so he drinks, and he pours pills into his mouth and he knows that she is worried, that he should be worried too, but he’s not sure if this will kill him or not so he might as well try it. There’s another girl there too, one he doesn’t know, and she offers a needle, says it will help, and it does, but only for a few hours, and then it’s only worse.   
The third day is when Dean finds him, and Castiel is barely conscious as Dean carries him back to his own cabin, but with what he can see, it is his Dean who holds him, who holds the glass of water to his lips and guides Castiel to drink.   
“I’m going to get Chuck,” Dean says at one point, and Cas reaches out, grabs ahold of Dean’s sleeve and refuses to let go.   
“Don’t leave me,” he begs, and Dean’s face softens.   
“I won’t,” he promises, but Castiel already knows that Dean will be gone in the morning, replaced by a man with hard eyes whose heartbeat may as well be the firing of a gun. But Dean stays that night, is there when Castiel falls asleep, and when he wakes in the morning, he’s alone. Dean has gone, in every sense of the word. He’s also stolen all the beer, the bastard.   
For a few hours, the memory of Dean, close and safe and his again is enough, but soon, all too soon, the memory of a needle overcomes it, and he goes to seek it out. 

***

It’s Risa who tells him to get off his ass and start going on missions again. That as much as the people here need him, it’s the ones out there who need him more. That he should spend a few days working on his aim—anything less than a perfect shot means you’re dead. His hands shakes slightly as he runs his fingers up the barrel of the gun, and when he pushes his sleeves up in the heat, he knows she sees the track-marks. It doesn’t matter—nothing is strong enough anymore.   
It’s the drugs more than anything that let him know there’s still a speck of angel left in him. Otherwise, he’d be dead by now. Every time he shoots up, it’s with the question of whether or not he’ll ever come back down. Is he human enough to die?  
He can see Dean watching them from a distance as they target shoot, one afternoon, and two weeks later, Dean finds him in his cabin, tells him he’s coming this time.   
“Coming on what?” Cas asks, rearranging the little statue that Evangeline had given him, of the Buddha. She and Chuck have both been working on him, finding little things, little emblems of faith. Cas is pretty sure Chuck must have told Evangeline what he is, because she looks at him differently now.   
Chuck had given him a cross the other day, on a silver string. It’s hanging on a nail in his bedroom now. Cas doesn’t know what to do with it.   
“Retrieval,” Dean tells him, and turns to leave. He gets tangled in the bead curtain over the doorway, thigh holster catching in the strings, curses, and it forces the first laugh Castiel has had in months.   
“Smartass,” Dean mutters as he pulls free.   
“No, I’m a dick,” Cas yells after him, and he thinks he sees Dean smile. Or maybe he’s just wishing so hard. 

***

The ‘retrieval’ turns out to be a small town in northern Montana, safe so far due to isolation, but not for much longer. They go with five transport vans, hopefully enough to get everyone out, and the people look at Castiel like he’s some sort of hero. He wants to tell them no, he’s not, he’s the reason this is happening in the first place, that it was him and Dean, him and Dean who lost it all. But it’s Dean who pulls him aside, shakes his head no, orders everyone into the vans with a hand clamped around Castiel’s arm. And when, driving down past the abandoned capital of Helena, they get attacked, it’s Dean who finds him, trapped beneath the overturned van.   
“Thought they got you,” he grits, as he pulls Castiel free, and Cas can’t stop the pained cry that escapes his lips as his foot is wrenched through the dirt. “You hurt?”  
“My foot,” Cas manages, and Dean crouches down to examine the way Castiel’s foot is twisted and wrong trapped within his boot.   
“Shit,” he says, and hauls Castiel up with a hand beneath each armpit. “Okay, come on, we gotta go before more of them show up.”  
“How many did we lose?” Cas asks as Dean slips one hand around his back, throws Castiel’s arm across his shoulders.   
“Two vans full,” Dean tells him, expression not changing. “There were demons with them.”  
“Yeah, I noticed that part, strangely enough,” Cas mutters, hissing as his foot bumps a rock by the side of the road. It had been the demons that had attacked the van he was riding in, sent him flying through the window when it crashed. Only one of the vans is still on the road, a few hundred feet away, but the others are tilted on their sides, and already Cas can see the bodies strewn across the ground. Croats, or soon-to-be Croats, the sorry sons-of-bitches. Never had a chance.   
One of the bodies is Evangeline.   
Cas stops when he sees, but Dean keeps going, doesn’t give him even a moment to take in the way her eyes stare up the sky, seeking salvation.   
“It happens, Cas,” is all he says while they drive. Castiel is in the passenger seat, foot propped up on the dashboard. It’s the only place he wouldn’t get crushed—they only have two vans left serviceable now, and the back is crammed with people, terrified people and hunters alike who stink of sweat, but not of blood, because if they smelled of blood, they would be shot at the side of the road as well.   
Castiel wonders if it was Dean who put the bullet through Evangeline’s head, when he saw the bite-marks up her neck.   
“I know it happens,” he tells Dean. He’d just hoped that maybe some of them, the best ones, would come out it.   
They drive into the night, and it’s hours later when Dean glances over and says, “You’re a liability. I don’t want you leaving camp again.”  
Cas splutters, and then winces when he jostles his foot on the dashboard. “I got trapped underneath a truck, how is that my fault? What the fuck, Dean?”  
Dean’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, but he does not speak.   
“You are not my new God,” Cas whispers. “I don’t have to obey you.”  
“You’re not leaving again, Cas,” Dean snarls, and Cas glares at him before settling back against the door and crossing his arms. His foot twinges again, and his hand sneaks into his pocket. The bottle he’d had hidden there was smashed against the ground when the car tipped, and the pills are scattered and crushed, powder that sticks to his fingertips. He licks one hand off.   
“Stop that,” Dean orders, truck swerving in the road as he reaches over the swat at Cas’s arm. “You don’t need that.”  
“You don’t know what I need,” Cas tells him, and sucks on his pinky, feels the grains of dirt as well of the dust of crushed pills coat his tongue. “Now watch the fucking road.”

***

Dean disappears when they get back to camp. Unloading survivors, crossing names off the lists. Chuck is the one who helps Cas back to his cabin, gets him into bed. Gives Cas the medications the camp doctor prescribed, but cleans him out of everything else. The needles hidden beneath his mattress, the absinthe stashed in a boot. Chuck’s fingers linger momentarily over the amulet in the cupboard before placing it reverently on the hook alongside the cross on the silver string.   
Cas can’t seem to focus. His vision blurs, and Chuck’s face above his turns to Dean’s to Sam’s to Dean’s and back again.   
“Dean…” he can hear himself whispering, frantic, low. “Where’s Dean?”  
“I’m right here,” Dean is saying, but it’s not his Dean, not his Dean who smiles and hopes and loves his brother and isn’t broken into pieces. “I’m right here, Cas.”  
“No, not you, not you.”  
A hand on his forehead, a pressure on his foot. How long has it been?   
His wings ache. He needs a fix. Just to dull the pain. Just a little.   
“No, Cas,” someone keeps saying. “No, you don’t need it.”  
How can they know?   
“You’re all I have left,” not-his Dean keeps saying, over and over and over again. “You can’t leave me too. You can’t.”  
He just wants it to be over. No matter what comes after, he just wants this to be over.   
By the time he wakes, there’s no one at all, and the amulet still hangs on the nail with the cross. It gleams. 

***

Two months, and he’s useless.   
The girls are just as warm, just as gentle, but it does nothing to help. With two of them, it’s simply twice the numbness. The drugs don’t help. Neither does the drink.   
He watches Dean leave sometimes, and he knows Dean watches him. Knows because the days that Dean sees the women—four, five, six leaving at a time—those are the nights that Chuck comes, makes the awkward conversation while he searches through coat jackets and pillow cases for the used needles. He stops finding them, after a while. There’s no use to something that doesn’t work.  
It’s after the first time he takes a man into his bed when Dean finally comes to see him. He stares at the rumpled bed sheets with disgust, shakes his head. “What the hell are you doing to yourself, Cas?” he asks.   
“Whatever I can,” Cas tells him. He’s cross-legged on the floor. Shirtless. Running fingers up scars and wondering how long it’s been now since he’s been able to heal them.   
“Stop that.” Dean’s hand, covering his, Dean’s fingers on track marks.   
“You don’t get to give me orders.”   
“Then stop doing stupid things so I don’t have to order you.”  
“Fuck you,” Cas tells him, and slaps Dean’s hands away.   
Dean slams his palm down on the floor, shoves his shoulder. Hard. “You’re going to fucking kill yourself one of these days.”  
That forces out a laugh, harsh, brittle. Breakable. “We’re all going to hell, Dean. If I have a little bit of fun before we get there, well that’s…”  
The words line themselves up on his tongue, but they won’t come out. Because there are no words that can actually describe what this is. Nothing that can speak of the weight of dead wings, the need to escape, the need to feel anything at all besides pain, the yearning for connection to replace what he lost in Heaven, to replace what he lost in Dean.   
And that will always be it. His fall has always centered on Dean, always relied on him. Cas may have jumped but Dean is the gravity that brings him down and now Dean is barely there at all.   
The Righteous Man and the Fallen Angel, what a joke.   
He stares at Dean’s face, studies the lines that weren’t there four year ago, the shadows under his eyes, the tightness of his jaw. Stares until Dean clears his throat and tries to stand, tries to back away, but Cas reaches out, grabs his arm and won’t let him go.   
“I wish I could save you,” he whispers, and watches as Dean squirms. “Just one more time.”  
“Bit late for that,” Dean says, voice rough, rougher than years of breathing in gunpowder and salt could ever make it.   
Cas moves his hand, places it on Dean’s shoulder, and remembers the hope he had felt when he’d found that lonely soul in Hell. “I know it is.”  
Dean makes a strangled sound in his throat, and leans forward, crowding Cas backwards until Dean’s hands are fisted in his shirt, and he’s forcing their mouths together, all tongue and teeth and claiming force, Dean taking everything as Cas has given everything in turn.   
They won’t call it a kiss, because a kiss implies romance.   
What they have is not a romance, and will never be a romance.   
This is two people who have nothing left but the other. What they have is desperation.   
And it’s desperate, the way they fuck. No words, never words, because words are useless when they can’t communicate. All that’s said is in the way Dean’s eyes slam shut, the way his fingers flex helplessly in the air, the smell of his sweat in the enclosed space mixing with the smell on incense and sex still left over from another man whose name Cas cannot even remember because it wasn’t Dean’s.   
It’s not pleasure, but necessity that drives them to orgasm—the rough skin of their palms and spit chafing to rawness—and Castiel thinks that Dean is the most addictive drug of all, a rush of pleasure that will leave nothing but the need behind.   
And like the empty needle, he is discarded, left behind as Dean dresses and leaves him once more, only an itch now in Castiel’s veins.   
Because what they have is not love. It is need. 

***

Nothing changes but the nights. They are still the same, small and shattered men, but on the nights Dean is there, they shatter each other even more, to the point that the only time Cas feels he properly functions is when Dean is hot beside him.   
Dean tells Cas one night that he is not allowed to die without him. His lip is bleeding when he says it, right where Cas could kiss it away, if they ever kissed.   
“We go to Hell together,” Cas agrees, binding the scrape on his arm. He thinks that, if he were anyone else, Dean would have had him killed simply for coming out of Croat territory with a bloody arm. But Dean has always made an exception for him.   
It was falling rubble from a bombed out building that nicked him. Not a Croat. He’s not that kind of monster.   
Dean fucks him with brutal, short thrusts that jar him up the bed and have him bracing his hands against the wall as the bed thunk-thunk-thunks into the wood and when he’s done, Dean lays his head on Cas’s collarbone, and Cas knows he is staring at the amulet, still side by side the little silver cross.   
“You need to kill him,” Cas says, because he knows that is what Dean is thinking. They haven’t made attempts on the Devil’s life. Not yet. “Sam is gone.”  
“I know he is.” Dean slides out of him, cock spent and cooling in his own come, and Cas hisses, lowers his legs to the mattress. “What can kill an angel, Cas?”  
“Another angel.” Cas turns his head to face the same direction, but his eyes find the cross instead. “And there are none.”  
“So you…?”  
“Another way, Dean.”  
He nods, and any vulnerability falls away as he sits up, stretches his arms above his head, making the scars down his skin gleam white. “We’ve been tracking the Colt.”  
“The Colt?”  
Dean reaches for his jeans, the gun lying on top of the crumpled pile of clothes. “How’s your foot healed up?”  
He rotates his ankle. “Well enough.”  
His own jeans hit him in the face as he sits up. “Then get dressed,” Dean tells him, “You’re coming.”

***

It’s unhealthy, what they have, but they are dead men walking, and it does not matter anyway. Dean might lead this apocalypse, but it’s Cas who pushes him onward and never relents. Questions him, because he’s the only one who will, as those final months pass on, relentless pursuit of the means to an end. Demons captured, tortured, and Cas remembers how once he’d said he would give anything for Dean not to have to do that.   
He’s already given everything. He has nothing left to bargain with.   
Cas knows Dean still sleeps around. He does, himself, women and men, and Dean, always Dean in the end, because he’s an addict to the way he and Dean complete each other in their mutual self-hatred. With Dean it is anger, and shame, and an overwhelming regret.   
What would it be, if we had saved the world instead of damning it? Castiel wonders sometimes. Maybe close touches and lingering eyes would have turned to something someday. Maybe not. Could have had romance, could have had kisses, maybe.   
Love? Not likely, but possible, for creatures like them, if the world had been a different place. If God had kept his word and watched over his errant children.  
For Dean, the amulet is a symbol of his dead brother. For Cas, it is the symbol of a neglectful father. They toss it in the flames together, and it burns red hot.   
That’s the last time they fuck, as the flames burn down on everything they had once placed their faith in. They don’t get another chance after that. 

***

It’s only when Castiel sees the wide-eyed innocence of a Dean from five-years before that he realizes he’s been pining for his Dean when his Dean is not really his, not anymore.   
And he is not this-Dean’s Castiel, either.   
So he smiles, and laughs, and teases, and sees the way that not-his-Dean stares at him, heartbroken and disbelieving, and hopes that for both their past-selves sake, that this Dean will have a chance at real kisses.   
His-Dean pulls him aside, before they climb into those vans, and he doesn’t say anything, but Castiel knows.   
Neither of them wants to survive this. And they’ve promised to die together.   
“Just make sure past-you gets out okay,” Castiel tells him, and Dean nods, claps him on the shoulder.   
“See you in Hell, then.”  
“See you in Hell,” Castiel whispers after him, as Dean heads to his own truck. 

***

He sees it happen, through the window, in that brief respite Risa’s death has bought him. Sees the bullet fail, sees the fall, sees the snap of the neck.   
Dean’s not allowed to leave him here alone.   
It’s his own bullet that sends Castiel on his way at last.


End file.
